Commentary

At the invitation of Anthony Rota, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Yaroslav Hunka went to Ottawa on 22 September 2023 to witness the visit of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. When The Jewish Daily Forward subsequently reported that Hunka had served in the 14 Waffen- Grenadier-Division der SS (galizische Nr. 1) – more commonly referred to as the Galicia Division – a controversy erupted. It continues to fester. Criminal vandalism against cemetery monuments to veterans of the Division has jacked up, even as Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine and Ukrainians has escalated. That is not a coincidence. Deplorably, some Canadians have bought into Soviet-era propaganda about the Galicia Division, as regurgitated by operatives of the Russian Federation and their fellow travellers in the West. That has only furthered the goals of a KGB campaign, known as Operation Payback, orchestrated to provoke tensions between the Jewish, Baltic and Ukrainian diasporas over what happened in eastern Europe during the Second World War...

The suggestion from Pope Francis that Ukraine should have the “courage” to raise the “white flag” and negotiate a settlement with (in other words, surrender to) Russia was deeply shocking for Kyiv and its backers. The understandably outraged response from Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, was that the only flag Kyiv would raise was its own: the yellow and blue of Ukraine. Some may think that the pope’s words are inconsequential to how this war unfolds. It is not the first time Pope Francis has displayed overtly pro-Russian sympathies, nor has the Vatican’s mediation, for instance regarding the liberation of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia, been successful so far. So what if the pope speaks out again about the war, given that his views are already known and his practical efforts to address the humanitarian dimensions of the war...

Almost immediately after the murder of her husband, Yulia Navalnaya announced that she would continue what he did. Now comes the hard part. What exactly will she do? Will she return to Russia and go to jail? Will she expose more corruption in the Russian army (and incidentally make the Russian army more efficient in killing more people in Ukraine)? Will she advocate lifting sanctions on Russia (including sanctions on Russian oligarchs)? Will she organize a national uprising? Will she focus on giving talks and speeches in London, Berlin and other capitals? Time will tell but, most likely, she will..

Imagine the British Prime Minister saying today that the US is an artificial state because its war for independence was arranged and sponsored by France and that, in reality, the US was always part of the UK and should remain so. And all who disagree are Nazis and should be “denazified.” This is precisely the logic Putin uses regarding the history of Ukraine to justify his current war to eradicate Ukraine’s independence and everything Ukrainian. Only the role of France in his propagandist narrative is assumed by Poland. At the same time, Ukraine is constantly described as “part of Russia,” subversively used as a weapon against the “Motherland” by Poles, later by Austria, and now by the USA. For contemporary Europeans and Americans, such reasoning could seem funny or insane. For Ukrainians, it is, too, but its...

Joining communities around the globe, Edmonton’s Ukrainian community marked the tragic second anniversary of russia’s full scale invasion of peaceful Ukraine on February 24, 2024. Approximately 2000 people, gathered at the Alberta Legislature grounds to commemorate the genocide being perpetrated against the Ukrainian Nation. This important event was organized by the Edmonton Branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) in cooperation with the Ukrainian National Federation, Edmonton Branch and the Alberta Provincial Council of the UCC. Edmonton UCC President Yaroslav Broda thanked everyone for standing with Ukraine, including various elected officials. The Nove Zhyttia Choir under the direction of Oleksandra Hryniuk who performed the Canadian and Ukrainian National Anthems opened the program. A moving prayer for Ukraine was delivered by Archpriest Cornell Zubritskу, Dean of St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Edmonton. In further remarks, Broda said “ Russia has...

On the night of November 30, 2023, Ukrainian saboteurs detonated an explosion in a key strategic tunnel located on the Baikal Amur Mainline (BAM) railroad in eastern Siberia. The attack on the Severomuysky tunnel is notable not only for the impact it had on Russian rail traffic in the Russian Far East but also because the Ukrainian security services organized and conducted a clandestine strike deep inside Russia at a distance of nearly 4,000 miles from the territory of Ukraine. Attributed to the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU, the attack is to date one of Kyiv’s boldest infrastructure strikes in the past year marked by repeated raids on Russian bases, factories, and railroads. These attacks include cross-border assaults into Russian territory adjoining Ukraine, such as Belgorod province, and also include aerial attacks on Russian strategic air bases by Ukrainian drones – such as the Tula air-based attack (home to the TU-95 nuclear bombers); and ...

Tucker Carlson is far from being the first Western journalist to have aligned himself with the enemy. There’s a long tradition of the likes of Hitler and Stalin finding pliable Brits and Americans to do their propaganda for them. Russian President Vladimir Putin can be confident he won’t be facing any zingers in his interview with Carlson, due to be broadcast on Thursday night in the U.S. It will probably be more an exercise in sycophancy akin to the softball encounter between Carlson and Donald Trump last August. Indeed, it could be an attempt to map out the contours of another Trump-Putin love-in. After all, Carlson nailed his colors to Putin’s mast long ago. He’s argued ...

When a rink in northern Virginia planned an ice show featuring Russian ice dancers last summer, it skated into a formidable opponent: Oksana Baiul. The 1994 Olympic champion found out that the show’s billed main attraction were Diana Davis and Gleb Smolkin—she the daughter of the notorious Russian skating coach Eteri Tutberidze—and thought their appearance would undermine the ban on Russians competing imposed after the invasion of Ukraine. So she leapt into action, texting an official at U.S. Figure Skating and asking pointed questions. The incident was a sign of the lengths to which Ukrainian athletes have been willing to go to enforce sports sanctions against Russia and its ally Belarus—one ice show and coaching clinic at a time—and how Ukraine’s current and former competitors have embodied the mentality of a country fighting for...

Does the U.S. have an obligation to aid Ukraine? The short answer to this question, one that many have been evading, is yes. The reasons have to do with America’s choices, policies and actions during the early 1990s. As the Soviet Union was collapsing, the H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations had a kind of bromance with Russian leaders, namely with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. There were numerous meetings and telephone calls both on the presidential level and on various ministerial levels. People were on a first-name basis and many American leaders tended to see the world the way Moscow’s leaders did. When the USSR finally collapsed in December 1991, Soviet nuclear assets were found in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. Ukraine at that time had the third-largest nuclear arsenal on earth, after the U.S. and Russia. As Eugene Fishel describes at length in his ...

The liberation of Kherson in early November of last year sparked a wave of euphoria as Ukrainians celebrated a landmark victory over Vladimir Putin’s invading army. Weeks later, this celebratory mood had given way to all-too-familiar feelings of grief and fury as the Ukrainian authorities uncovered evidence of war crimes committed during the city’s eight-month Russian occupation. This grim process has already been repeated in hundreds of liberated villages, towns, and cities throughout northern and eastern Ukraine. On each occasion, retreating Russian troops have left behind a vast crime scene of mass graves, torture chambers, sexual violence, and deeply traumatized communities. Specific accounts of civilian suffering are strikingly similar from region to region, indicating that these crimes are the result of deliberate Kremlin policy rather than the rogue actions of individual Russian army units. Wherever Russia establishes control, anyone regarded as posing a potential threat to ...